Pentagon Scientists Weigh Creating Human 'Super Soldiers' so Deadly They'd Eventually Have to be 'Terminated'
Top Defense Department scientists plan to create “super soldiers” modeled after the popular Marvel characters Captain America and Iron Man.
Pentagon officials discussed the planned creation of “super soldiers” for the battlefield, at their Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference in Orlando on Nov. 29.
Among the topics discussed at the conference were “breeding programs, Marvel movies, The Matrix, and the various technologies the Pentagon is researching with the goal of creating a real life super soldier complete with cybernetic implants and thorny ethical issues surrounding bodily autonomy.”
“So we have a wide range of panelists here to cover the kind of breadth that might involve a super soldier,” Lauren Reinerman-Jones, an analyst from Defense Acquisition University, said during the introduction. “Now, when we hear super soldier, what do we usually think? We think Marvel, right? Captain America…Iron Man.”
Several enhancements for soldiers were discussed at the conference including giving soldiers synthetic blood, replacing night-vision goggles with eye drops, and giving a “soldier of the future” pain-numbing stimulants and the “ability to regrow limbs and quickly heal wounds like a lizard.”
“Enhanced soldiers would be reduced to bionic men, who run fast, do not need to sleep, eat and drink very little, and can fight all the time. A new species is born: Homo robocopus,” one slide said.
When asked about equipping retired veterans with this new technology, research scientist J.J. Walcutt suggested that it could give retired veterans a sense of purpose and help to reduce depression rates.
“If we can use people, regardless of their physical capabilities or we can enhance their capabilities, why can’t we increase the longevity of service?” Walcutt said.
“We’ve actually been working with a company called Teledyne to look at technologies that are able to write to the brain at a very high resolution,” Richard McKinley, who works on “non-invasive brain stimulation” for the Air Force said.
“This is very early, so there’s still a lot of development to do. But this is something that will be coming in the future, to be able to wear a device that non-invasively can write information directly to your brain without any surgery, without any sensation on your skin,” McKinley continued.
The discussion then went to the ethical and legal challenges of creating “super soldiers.”
“What risks are we willing to take? There’s all these wonderful things we can do,” U.S. Army Developmental Command Representative George Matook said.
“We don’t want a fair fight. We really don’t, this is not an honorable thing. We want our guys to be over-matching any possible enemies, right? So why aren’t we giving them pharmaceutical enhancements? Why are we making them run all week when we could just be giving them sterioids? There’s all these other things you could do if you change societal norms and ethics. And laws, in some cases.”
“We could find ourselves in a situation where our soldiers, as talented and trained as they are, are facing an unfair fight because another country is willing to say, Hey guess what, you, male, are a good aviator. You, female, are a good aviator. You’re gonna make the best aviator babies we’ve ever seen and I don’t care that you’re not married,” Matook continued. “That’s a thing. Are they willing to go that extra step that we are not?”
Reinerman-Jones asked the panelists “So if you do these kinds of changes to an individual, what do you do when their service is up?” “Termination” U.S. Army Developmental Command Representative Irwin Hudson joked.
Congressional Democrats reportedly have their sights set lower with Illinois Senators Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin offering other solutions for military recruitment, including enlisting illegal immigrants to help with the recruitment shortfalls.
“My colleague from Illinois [Senator Tammy Duckworth] has a bill that says if you’re an undocumented person in this country and you can pass the background test and the like, you can serve in our military. And if you do it honorably, we will make you citizens of the United States,” Durbin said Monday.
“Do we need that? Do you know what the recruiting numbers are at the Army, Navy and Air Force? They can’t find enough people. And there are undocumented people who want to serve this country. Should we give them the chance? I think we should,” Durbin continued.
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